In this post, I’ll try to compare Adobe Illustrator with Affinity Designer.

Every designer or any other person who is in design area familiar with Illustrator and for what you can use it. Adobe Illustrator sharing leadership with CorelDraw in Vector design software. As it is a for some people it can be expensive especially for people who use it not for business. Also, Adobe Illustrator gets more and more heavy with every new release.

Here I want to introduce you very young and in same time powerful Design Software Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer developing by UK company Serif. Current version 1.5.3 and in compare to 21 version of AI its very young software.

Of course, you can say that how you can company AI to small software that nobody knows? Yes, of course, AI is huge and without controversy, it has big benefits front of other software especially in design process.

But ask yourself what you need? Do you need to use most popular software and pay for it much more or do you need to do work? If you are answering “I need to do my work” then you can start to use Affinity Designer.

What about features?

As Adobe Illustrator very old software (Not older than CorelDraw) it has a wide range of tool and feature and collected through all these years. But think about that do you always use all features that AI has? Most of the user even don’t know which features it has.

Affinity Designer has less features that AI but it has all necessary tools that can help you create your work.

One big thing that I don’t like in Adobe Illustrator is It’s almost impossible to export big print files. Is has a very small list of supported file formats. That’s why all printing companies use CorelDraw.

How to migrate?

If you are AI user and want to migrate to AD then for you it will be easy. You can watch Affinity Designer interface review here

The interface of Affinity designer very close to Illustrator and most of the tools also acting like in Adobe Illustrator. But some familiar tools from illustrator working a little bit different. Most of the tool boxes are similar. Affinity Designer tools less that abode illustrator but here you can find tools that can be alternative to the few tools that you can find in Illustrator.

In affinity designer, you open .ai and eps files and work with them like native files. But you’ll need to save them in affinity designer file format. You can export files to many most popular formats.

What about price?

As you know Adobe Illustrator now available with a monthly subscription for 19.99 usd. That’s making too much if you are rarely using it for design.

Affinity designer cost about 39.99 for a one-time purchase that making it available for more users.

Conclusion

An affinity Designer very good cheap alternative to more popular vector design software like Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. It's easy to use, light and functional.

It has powerful vector editing tools and easily can be combined with photo editing tool Affinity Photo.

In this tutorial I’ll continue to show you how to work in Affinity Designer.

In this tutorials, you’ll learn how to create simple geometric figure Rectangle and similar tool Rounded Rectangle. As in all vector design software, it is pretty easy to draw but as in every software has different features of objects.

So let’s begin.

To draw Rectangle click on the icon and after clicking mouse cursor and top panel will change. Now you can just click and drag to draw a rectangle.

One thing that I don’t like in Affinity Designer is here, all your objects must be on the sheet. Object that outside of page will not visible. When workspace visible that’s very useful. Because when you are working with complex design and don’t want to every time turn off and on layers, you can simply put them to the side and continue work like in Coreldraw, Inkscape or in Illustrator.

After creating, switch to select tool and then select object. You’ll see that when you are selecting top toolbar gets active and here you can see all features of selected object.

If you’ll like to change position, dimension or rotation angle then you can do it in Transform panel that you can find on the right bottom of software.

That’s little bit uncomfortable especially if you are ex-user of other vector design software. But you can easily drag and attach transform dialog box to any place or even make it flow.

Now let’s take look at top toolbar and see what kind of features we can find there

The first options on the top toolbar from the left side are the color of fill and stroke of selected shape. Here also you can control all stroke parameters.

With Single Radius, you can control how the radius of corners will work. Right now all corners radius will be equal. But if you’ll uncheck it then you’ll able to set a different radius for each corner.

With absolute size, you can switch between pixels and percent in corner radius.

You can also control style of corner smoothness.

This option makes you available to see rotation center of the object. By default, it's in the center of the object and will rotate around this point. You can change the position of this point to make object rotate differently.

Hide selection with this icon. You can see it when drawing.

By this button, you can reset selection box. This option useful if you are rotating the object.

By this option, you can convert an object into curves that give you the ability to modify an object in many ways.

Every illustration of hard looking design is combined and modified simple shapes. So that’s why first you need to know how to work with simple standard tools.

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